Films don't automatically draw tourists in, writes Hugh Linehan, Entertainment Editor
In a former life, before discovering the more sedentary joys of journalism, I used to seek out and manage locations for Irish films. The locations I worked on included the Ballymun towers and Sherriff Street flats for The Commitments. Despite the popularity of that film, I haven't seen busloads of tourists making the pilgrimage to those places. Which suggests that, in the movie tourism game, certain rules apply.
First, the film must be a hit - or at least not a flop, of which Ireland has had a few lately. The notion of thousands of tourists flocking to visit the exact place where, er, King Arthur was made is rather implausible, especially since the film's most exciting feature, a Very Big Wall, was dismantled years ago. Second, it should be a place of outstanding natural beauty or historical resonance. Which, with all due respect to Ballymun and Sherriff Street, rules them out (besides which, one is going and the other already gone).
Ideally, the film should be a blockbuster. In recent times, only two such behemoths have been shot in Ireland: Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan. Unfortunately, just like King Arthur, neither was actually set here, which removes a substantial part of the allure for movie-mad tourists.
As Northern Ireland's CS Lewis campaign demonstrates, tourist agencies around the world are trying harder than ever to woo movie-loving tourists. Oxford is also touting for Narnia fans. And for good reason. An academic paper published in the Annals of Tourism Research some years ago concluded that a popular movie's shoot location can expect an average surge in visitors of 54 per cent. In 2004, a survey of foreigners holidaying in France found 80 per cent were more inclined to visit the country after watching movies such as Amelie, which may explain why president Jacques Chirac personally intervened to enable Ron Howard to film The Da Vinci Code on location in the Louvre last year.
The Da Vinci Code is the current movie location favourite, although that's clearly due as much to Dan Brown's book as to Howard's film. The other location-destination movie of recent years, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, with its spectacular New Zealand landscapes, revitalised a tourist industry now worth more than €4 billion. Shortly before the release of the final instalment, New Zealand's science minister Pete Hodgson declared that the films had changed his country's image forever: "New Zealand has started to lift its sights now," he said. "Lord of the Rings has definitely made the country realise what it can achieve. We have always been a very young country but I think this has moved us into early adulthood." In a recent survey of visitors, 87 per cent said they knew the films were shot in New Zealand. Specialist LOTR travel companies have cropped up across the country.
As Hodgson implies, a successful movie can do more than just attract visitors to see the country where it was made; it can shift perceptions of that country around the world. But, in the worldwide scramble for tourism revenue, the results are not always positive. Visits to Phi Phi Leh island near Phuket in Thailand soared after Alex Garland's novel, The Beach, was turned into a film there starring Leonardo DiCaprio, causing ecological pressures. Locals on the Greek island of Cephalonia were not totally happy when visitor numbers soared after the release of Captain Corelli's Mandolin. Fortunately for them, the film flopped and numbers subsided.
But the granddaddy of movie tourist destinations is Salzburg: 75 per cent of all American tourists visit the Austrian city because of their devotion to the sickly-sweet The Sound of Music. Forty years after the film's release an estimated 300,000 fans visit the city every year on the strength of the musical, with 40,000 taking the official Sound of Music Tour.
But spare a thought for those who suffer the flipside of movie fame: the gruesome slasher movie Hostel topped the US box office recently with its story of a group of American teenagers travelling in Slovakia, who are abducted, locked in a dungeon and tortured with chainsaws and blow-torches. Slovakian tourist officials were not at all pleased.